Twitter as you've never tasted it before

Whether it’s the rise and proliferation of infographics from media buzzword to bestselling book, or the first Data Journalism Awards this year, data visualisation now pervades almost all disciplines, employed and celebrated as a means of conveying information effectively.

It came as no surprise, then, that the topic was turned on its head at this year’s Campus Party Europe in Berlin, Germany. Billed as “the biggest electronic entertainment event in the world”, the festival is a week of tech-related talks and workshops with 10,000 participants - in the words of keynote speaker, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, “a hackathon gone big”.

On Wednesday last week, a trio from the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design (CIID) in Denmark, demonstrated their Tasty Tweets project. According to students Kat Zorina, Ruben van der Vleuten and Kostantinos Frantzis, data visualisation is all well and good, but some of it is - quite frankly - boring. “Some infographics are practical but don’t really trigger action”, explained van der Vleuten. “We wanted to move away from these conventions and take a more tangible approach”.

The Tasty Tweets software scans the social networking API 100 tweets at a time, searching for mentions of specific fruit names - tonight it was apple, orange, pineapple and cranberry. The proportions of each are analysed then used to trigger valves in vessels containing corresponding fruit juices. The resulting Twitter smoothie collects in a glass below as a gustatory representation of the initial data.

The CIID team envision developing their project to be applied to the "quantified self" movement - which strives for “self knowledge through numbers” - as a way of generating drinks based on individuals’ nutritional requirements at any given time. An audience member, however, had other ideas - namely a bar that facilitates truly social drinking by creating beverages based on guests’ online interactions.

Twitter may taste fruity for now but what does it sound like? I found out on Saturday, when British duo Daniel Jones and Peter Gregson presented The Listening Machine - an automated, online system that generates wholly digitally native compositions based on Twitter activity.

Like their contemporaries at CIID, Jones, a music artist and programmer,and Gregson, a cellist and composer, are driven by the static nature of traditional data visualisation and were keen to add flow and a human element by incorporating sound. They noticed that Twitter data is often referred to in a similar way to music, with words like “orchestration” and “volume” constantly overlapping.

“Music can be used to more accurately represent digital human interactions and reflect the dynamics of conversations.” Gregson explained. To avoid the challenges of dealing with the sheer mass of data generated by Twitter, they draw from a small subset of 500 users involved in a spectrum of social life. Sponsored by the BBC and Arts Council England for multimedia platform The Space, the topics covered correspond with the BBC’s own categories, with 10 per cent of users each involved in sports, technology, arts, politics, health, business and science, and the remaining 20 per cent selected at random. These 500 tweeters are fixed throughout the six-month project and remain unaware of their participation.

The Listening Machine gauges the sentiment of tweets, their rate and subject matter. Scanning for emoticons and adjectives, the sentiment is translated into major, minor and modal chords depending on whether the mood is happy, sad or neutral respectively. The rate of tweets determines the tempo of the composition, and the topics themselves also have a specific sound. The rhythm of the music is dictated by the rhythm of tweeted sentences.

The artists mapped the vowel sounds of the English language's 1000 most used words onto musical phrases, which were then painstakingly played by musical ensemble Britten Sinfonia’s instruments. “We had a room full of accomplished musicians playing ridiculously easy music. People started to make mistakes through sheer boredom.” laughed Gregson.

Launched in May, The Listening Machine was built in six weeks straight, but like the tweets it captures, it has a short life, coming to an end on 31 October. However, Jones and Gregson intend to devise a live orchestral version of the piece, with musicians playing to scores generated on-screen in real time, potentially using a sample of location-specific Twitter accounts for every tour date.

Jonathan Lethem broached this sort of synesthesiac (is that a word?) informational presentation in his dystopian sci-fi noire book. Gun, with Occasional Music. Thanks for reminding me of that enjoyable book.